if he hadn't known the Atwaters at Bass Rocks, the Doctor said no and they walked away. He hung around the piano until eleven o'clock, when his wife rejoined him and said that they had to go. "Did you have a good time, darling?" she asked, and then she said, "You seemed awfully quiet." He said that he had had a good tin1e. After the Atvvaters', the Hardins went to the Dreyfusses', and the same thing happened there. Then the Hardins had the Atwaters for dinner, and even in his own house the Doctor found himself standing by the fireplace with nothing to say while the raillery of 'his wife's friends sailed over his head. Then they went to the Dreyfusses' again and they had the Dreyfusses, and then they went to the Picketts' and the Osgoods' and the Pingrees', and the Doctor continued to find himself stand- ing alone by fireplaces, staircases, and grand pianos. Sometimes Nellie or his hostess would rescue him and introduce him to a group of people, but he never made any headway. After a month or so of this, Dr. Hardin began to realize his trouble: He '-' had no small talk. Outside of medicine, he had no talk of any sort. He knew a lot about the human body and its affiictions and weaknesses, but he knew nothing about manners or about the sinuous and fragile construction" of love '-' and self-esteem that human beings are continually build- ing and altering among themselves. Most of his do- mestic life had been over- eating at dinner and falling asleep over the newspaper. He had spent his formative years in a laboratory, where the only life was the m ulti- plication of bacteria, and when a pretty woman came up to him at a party, the . only thing he could think to tell her, even if his heart was hammering with joy, was that she seemed to be suffer- ing from a slight edema. F or a while, Nellie didJ?' t . say anything about his social shortcomings, but on the way home from parties she sometimes spoke sharply to him about other things. He knew himself that he faced a problem, and he decided to broaden his in ter- ests and loosen his tongue by reading books. He read a historical novel and two plays by Shakespeare, but 22 whatever it is that makes literature seem noble to most people was lacking in the Doctor. "The quality of mercy is not strain'd," he read, "it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath," but his mind wandered over the page of verse looking for the medical truths that he had studied all his lIfe. And anyhow the books didn't help, he discovered. Finally, Nellie was driven to speak to her husband about his failure. It was a night when they had come in from the Trenchers', and they were getting ready for bed. "You don't make the effort, darling," she said. "You really don't make any effort to keep the ball roll- ing." Suddenly, she began to cry. "You're a terrible bore, darling," she said. "I know I shouldn't say it, but I've heard so many other people say it that I feel I have to tell you. You're Svveet and you're a good doctor, but you're a dreadful bore." She turned out the light and lay in bed crying. T HE Doctor adored Nellie, and her words impressed hin1. They re- turned to him several times during the following few days and he sweated with bewilderment. It seemed comical to him that his happiness should be threatened by a lack of small talk, but there was also the feeling that he had fêiled as a social being, failed for the MAY 2. 9, I 9 4 8 first time in his life, and that as \vel1 as making his wife unhappy he was deny ing himself a feast of h Ulnan warmth and knowledge. It seen1ed wrong to him that his experience should be limited to medicine and that all he should be able to read in a face was the story of a sound constitution or the ravages of disease. He wanted to ..... learn to talk, to speak from his heart to strangers. One afternoon, on a day when the Hardins were expected at the Atwa ters' for dinner, the Doctor cancelled all his appointments and shut himself up in his office. He took a sheet of paper and a sharp pencil and, using the inductive reasoning that his mind was trained to, examined his memory of the dinner par- ties he had been to, searching for their constan t characteristics and the nature of the ball he was supposed to keep roll- ing. Then he narrowed his considera- tions from the general scene to the party at the Atwaters' that night. He listed the guests who would probably be there, their interests, and the drift the conver- sation was likely to take. After he had made a reasonably good chart of the conversation he might expect to hear, he faced the problem of what his role in this talk should be. He spent the late hours of that after- noon-it was a rainy one-lnemorizing the editorial pages of several morning newspapers. Now, the Doc- tor had an extraordinary memory; the profession'al burdens on this faculty were so great that he had trained it to respond to key words and phrases that could re- mind him of paragraphs and sometimes pages of medical information, and in committing the editorials to memory he used this sys- tem. When he got home, he copied the key words on the inside of the left cuff of his dress shirt and also wrote them on a piece of paper that would fit into his cigarette case. ..t.-\t eight 0' clock, he and his wife took a taxi to the Atwaters'. The party was large, as usual, and while the guests drank their cocktails, the greetings and introductions made up most of the talk. The Doctor took in to dinner a woman frot'll the West Coast whose husband was in the lumber business, tl;V/Jf ú but he didn't make any par-